REVOLUTIONIZING THE FACTORY FLOOR: METAVERSE'S IMPACT ON MANUFACTURING

The Metaverse is revolutionizing the digital experience and opening up immense possibilities for various industries. The market and revenue opportunities would be close to $800 billion globally in 2024. Powered by advanced technology, it offers a unique appeal of a decentralized ecosystem that empowers consumers to create and drive their online experience per their individual preferences.

How Do We Leverage the Metaverse for Manufacturing?

A metaverse-driven approach to manufacturing is akin to companies like Shopify democratizing e-commerce and facilitating relationships between business owners and suppliers. In the context of the metaverse, you have three key stakeholders in the manufacturing process:

1. Design Companies/Owners: individuals or companies that will use simulation and CAD-like software to design factory layouts as well as design components to be manufactured.

2. 3rd Party Manufacturers and Logistics Providers: individuals or companies in the supply chain ecosystem that will be able to set up manufacturing centres and produce different commodities with less friction and smaller lead times.

3. Customers: these users will see the delivery time for products.

Ultimately, there are key facets of a service-based metaverse that will change the manufacturing landscape for all of these stakeholders. Below are some of the key highlights:

? Rapid production process design — in a metaverse framework, you could easily drag-and-drop your assets in a physics-based simulation and can easily identify how to be more efficient or safe in manufacturing without needing to perform significant physical testing.

? Increase in number of product designs — as with any new technology where there is ease-of-access for user-generated content, there is an expectation to see more content provided within specific genres and business segments (similar to how content is handled by YouTube). In the case of manufacturing, the barrier to entry for designing low-cost, easy-to-build products is significantly lower with more specific measurements and advanced CAD-like software.

? More collaborative product development — the metaverse is a communal space for sharing ideas. As such, it is incredibly easy for different stakeholders within a business to design a product, share it with manufacturers within the same environment, and iterate based on feedback, which will shorten the product life cycle for projects.

? Reduced risk to quality control — With more detailed, physics-based designs, the margin of error for production is much smaller. In terms of impact to businesses, they will see lower churn rates for customers as well as lower return rates for defective products.

? Increased transparency for customers — customers in the metaverse will have improved visibility into the supply chain process with 3D representations for how products are built, distributed, and sold. Increased transparency means that customers will be able to know what exact lead times are for goods and any expected delays in shipping, as well as more visibility into real-time shipping costs for different distributors for both freight and last-mile delivery.

What Is the Long-Term Strategy?

Long term, the synergy between improved digital operations, higher quality GUIs, and improved hardware infrastructure and cloud networking will facilitate the ability for any individual to design a component, test it out in an immersive environment using their avatar, collaborate with others, including manufacturers, and design systems to build products quickly — all while keeping overhead costs and lead times down.

This may sound great, but fundamentally, the end state is the easy part. The real question is how we get there.

What are the Next Steps to Optimize Manufacturing Processes?

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Realistically, in the near term (5–10 years), five core areas need to see improvement before applying the metaverse to manufacturing can be done:

? Scaling Data Warehousing — currently, most manufacturing businesses still rely on legacy systems for warehousing data provided by SAP and similar SaaS companies. In order to improve, manufacturing and logistics providers need to update their inventory

? Improving Physics Engines for Simulation Softwares — currently, facilities design softwares are fairly rudimentary when it comes to simulation. Prominent software tools such as Simio or AnyLogic focus less on physics and more on Monte Carlo simulations based on stochastic systems, which is not accurate in reality since a user will need to account for errors due to general mechanics in the real world. These simulation tools will need to be combined with physics-based tools such as SolidWorks in order to be viable for the metaverse.